A Diva Who Resists Definition: The Met’s Faust May Have Provided Marina Poplavskaya’s Most Satisfying Lead Role Yet in New York

Her performance was attuned to Des McAnuff’s hard-edged, industrial vision

The question posed by the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Gounod’s Faust, other than how long Peter Gelb intends for us to endure what increasingly seems like a willful parade of directorial incompetence, is what is to be thought about Marina Poplavskaya.

Ms. Poplavskaya, who played the lead female role of Marguerite, is one of those singers about whom there is genuine debate. People aren’t quite sure what to make of her. Though she has starred in three major new productions at the Met in the past year, she isn’t a popular star, exactly. You’d be hard-pressed to find a random New Yorker who recognized her name.

But she’s not a connoisseur’s favorite, either. Opera lovers tend not to have liked the long profile about her that appeared in the New Yorker last year (which is also the only reason a wider audience would have heard of her). Written by the legendary journalist Gay Talese, it was a funny, delirious celebration of the kind of diva thought to be a thing of the past, the kind of diva even diehards have come to be embarrassed of.

Near the beginning, Mr. Talese writes about her reluctance to have him visit her in Russia due to a rash of forest fires. “She relented,” he writes, “asking only that I bring from New York as many surgical masks as I could find.”

Later in the piece Ms. Poplavskaya hauls her bags in a luggage cart across 14 lanes of Buenos Aires traffic when she abruptly decides to move from one hotel to another. At one point she and Mr. Talese appear not to be on speaking terms: “It was my fault that she had sung so poorly,” he surmises from her attitude during their interaction after a rehearsal. (It’s not a strategy I’d generally recommend singers try with writers, but Mr. Talese seems, like a long line of older men before him, ultimately entranced by her.) In sum, she comes across seeming rather mad, which is the usual evaluation of her by her colleagues.

The morning after the Faust premiere The Observer received an email from an opera aficionado comparing Ms. Poplavskaya to Delia Rigal, another vocally flawed yet compelling soprano (now largely forgotten) who had a brief but strong run at the Met in the 1950s. Ms. Rigal made her company debut as Elisabetta in Margaret Webster’s star-studded production of Verdi’s Don Carlo, which kicked off Rudolf Bing’s reign as the company’s general manager; Ms. Poplavskaya appeared last year as Elisabetta in another new Don Carlo, this one directed by Nicholas Hytner.

She was perplexing in the role, sometimes vocally hard-edged and uncertain of pitch but utterly magnetic. I keep returning to one moment, deep in the opera. Elisabetta has discovered that her lady-in-waiting, Princess Eboli, was once the king’s mistress, and banishes Eboli to a convent.

Before she does, she forces the princess to return a cross. It was entirely arresting, the way Ms. Poplavskaya held her hand out for the necklace, her back tense and her fingers painfully frozen. Her posture alone told you everything you needed to know about the character and her trajectory from innocence to experience. This, you were convinced, was a star.

A month later you were reconvinced, when she starred in Verdi’s La Traviata. (In both productions, Ms. Poplavskaya was in the right place at the right time, taking over the Carlo that was originally planned with Angela Gheorghiu and the Traviata that was intended for Anna Netrebko.) The first act, which requires dazzling coloratura agility, was difficult for her, and once again there were pitch problems and a persistent thinness of tone. But she hit her spots: in the second act she seemed physically transformed by Violetta’s tragedy. Opera lovers are often willing to accept many vocal shortcomings from singers who fascinate and move them, a phenomenon that has allowed Ms. Poplavskaya—who has striking looks that translate well to the Met’s high-def broadcasts—to be successful.

The Faust was perhaps her most satisfying leading role yet in New York. This was not the sentimental little-girl Marguerite generations of audiences have come to love. Of the lead performances, Ms. Poplavskaya’s was the most attuned to Des McAnuff’s hard-edged, industrial vision of the work, which Mr. McAnuff updated to the dawn of the atomic age. While the tenor Jonas Kaufmann seemed bored and the bass-baritone Rene Pape had a bit too much color for this black and white world, Ms. Poplavskaya’s cool, sometimes even raw singing somehow fit the skeletal catwalks and scaffolding that served as the unit set.

Her ballad about the King of Thule was more profound than simply melancholy; her Jewel Song had mania in its joyfulness. Near the end of the opera, delirious, her hair roughly cropped, Ms. Poplavskaya’s Marguerite seemed both personal and universal, the sound emerging out of her in a narrow, penetrating line.

Comments

Have not really been impressed with Marina who has hard edge and is not a great actress. Netrebko is a tough act to follow. I know Gelb has high hopes for Poplavskaya. Unfortunately Gelb’s problems lie in the littany of poor productions. The only ones that have shined are those co-produced with other opera houses.

I just saw Faust; I had to send a note to GELB! The soprano is second-rate, period. Any American Master student could have done better. She doesn’t have a strange technique, she has NO technique. She has extreme lip and jaw tension. The sound is uneven because there’s no column of breath with support. When she inhales she exhibits neck tension which belies serious flaws in training. The coloratura passages were a mess and as others have said, the high notes were tortured! She is billed as a spinto but she does not have the easy SIZE of a spinto that is at home with heavier roles. I know because I am a spinto and heavy roles, once they are worked into the voice are pretty effortless. She has to force which causes that hard sound.
All of this seems to me the result of a new approach to opera that is visual. I like good staging; but it serves the singer, not the other way around. Opera is about great sound. Unforgettable moments of epiphany where SINGERS touch our souls. I don’t care if the person looks the part, is svelte, or young. In fact, in the past, most of the Met’s roster would still be honing their skills in local companies and touring productions. But there is a rush to use them while they are YOUNG and pretty. They aren’t seasoned so what we are getting are singers who are not yet developed and it shows. Who is going to buy a ticket for this? Seriously, scholrs and musicologists must be apoplexic! I know as a singer that it’s painful to watch Marina Poplavskaya. She will soon experience severe vocal problems and disappear to teach some poor trusting students who don’t know better. What a tragedy!